The mishaps started piling up around 4 PM. There were so many of them, it was almost funny. Almost. Like, not funny at the time but funny now. Making both shabbos meals, one fleishig (meat) and one milchig (dairy), was a little ambitious but I figured I’m on vacation this week, I have time, I’m cooking. I did the shopping on Wednesday and Thursday, experimenting with grocery deliveries from Fairway (worth it) and Fresh Direct (not worth it), so by Thursday night I was ready to go.
(A quick aside on having groceries delivered: shocking, I know, but I’ve managed to live in Manhattan for 10 years without having my groceries delivered. I ordered from Fresh Direct once but I was appalled at the number of boxes that arrived—I’m hardly an environmentalista but I am from California—and I missed picking out the produce myself. I like to squeeze my lemons and sniff my parsley. Between having a car I could load up with groceries and nickle-diming the very good bodega downstairs, deliveries were unnecessary.)
I made a roasted chicken dish I clipped from the New York Times a while back and it was a disaster. The recipe called for laying the chicken on a bed of sliced crusty bread, which would then soak up the juices from the chicken. It sounded delicious. But after about 30 minutes, the bread ran out of juices to absorb and started to burn. I think I used too many slices. I had about 20 minutes before shabbos, when all cooking and a whole lot of other things that I hadn’t done yet have to stop, so to say I was stressed is to put it mildly. I picked out the burned slices and threw them into a garbage bag, unaware that the bag was resting ever so lightly on the oven door. By the time I realized it, much of the plastic had melted and was quite stuck to the door. I grabbed a sponge and desperately scrubbed away. This has actually happened to me before, under different circumstances, and I wasn’t completely successful at getting the plastic off that time. For a thousand reasons, among them half-cooked chicken, my landlady’s fancy-shmancy oven, and shabbos, I was so relieved when the plastic came off.
I mixed a few tried-and-true recipes and a few new ones. Since lunch was going to be milchig I made my very favorite dessert in the whole wide world, creme brulee. I use the Barefoot Contessa’s recipe, substituting plain brandy for Grand Marnier since the latter isn’t kosher. And would you believe I baked those lemon butter cookies again? This time, though, I used real butter instead of margarine because they didn’t have to be pareve (neither milchig nor fleishig). They are so good with butter. The poached salmon was so-so. I’m not very good at fish because I make it so rarely. But drowned in sour cream and dill sauce, which I love, it was fine. I also made ajvar, which is a Serbian roasted pepper thing that I admired in a shop in Astoria but have never actually eaten. I don’t know if mine tasted authentic, but it certainly tasted good.
Dinner’s winners were harira, a Moroccan soup that I adore (the recipe is from Ottolenghi: The Cookbook, which is amazing but from the UK so if you’re terrible at math, like me, get yourself the Units iPhone app, which makes converting from the metric system so easy. Do I sound like Apple is paying me for this post? It isn’t) and lemon cake. It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that it really does make a difference when you beat the sugar and the butter or margarine until light and fluffy, like every recipe tells you to. The cakes turn out lighter and fluffier themselves.
By the time my dinner guests arrived I was famished and exhausted. A pleasure to dine with. Luckily, the guests are good friends and anyhow, they were famished and exhausted themselves. Lunch was much more successful. The last guests left five hours later and even offered to wash the dishes. I wish I had said yes.
2 years ago • 1 note
